From Editor to Baker: Janet Feenstra's Career Shift Amid AI Concerns

The moment things shifted

Janet Feenstra had built a career around precision and language. Since 2013, she had worked as a freelance editor in Stockholm, helping researchers and academics refine their work. The role suited her: meticulous, intellectual, conducted largely from her own workspace. In addition to her freelance practice, she held a part-time position at Malmö University, where she performed language editing for non-English speaking researchers—work that felt purposeful and direct.

But by 2026, the ground beneath that career had begun to feel unstable. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence raised a question that many in her field were asking: What happens to an editor when machines can edit? Feenstra found herself genuinely concerned that the profession she had spent over a decade building might become obsolete. It was not an abstract worry. It was specific enough to prompt action.

What they tried

Rather than wait to see how AI would reshape her field, Feenstra made a deliberate choice to leave. She stepped away from her freelance editing work in Stockholm and from her position at Malmö University. The decision was significant—she was abandoning not just a job, but the identity and routine that had defined her professional life for years.

In 2026, she relocated to Malmö and began working in a bakery. It was a departure in every sense: different city, different work, different daily experience. A bakery offered something her editing career had not—immediate, tangible results. Dough became bread. Ingredients became finished products. There was no algorithmic uncertainty, no sense of competing with machines that might do the work faster or cheaper.

What worked, what didn't

The transition was not without friction. Feenstra held mixed feelings about the change. She acknowledged the genuine challenges of leaving behind a career she had invested years in building. The loss was real, even if the decision had been her own.

Yet something unexpected emerged from the new role. The work in the bakery proved more fulfilling than she had anticipated. There was creativity in it—in technique, in composition, in the daily problem-solving that baking requires. There was also the satisfaction of making something with her hands, of seeing and tasting the results of her labour. The work felt different from editing in ways that mattered to her.

"I have a lot more fun now, but I don't want to be grateful to AI for this – I'm still a little bit bitter." — Janet Feenstra

The quote captures something important: her experience was not a simple redemption story. She was genuinely enjoying her new work, but the circumstances that had forced the change still stung. The bitterness was real. So was the joy.

What they'd tell someone else

Feenstra's experience suggests that sometimes the external pressures we fear—technological disruption, obsolescence, the sense that our skills are becoming redundant—can push us toward changes we might not otherwise have made. In her case, that push led somewhere better, though not in the way she might have predicted. She did not find a new editing role that felt secure. She found something else entirely.

What matters is that she acted on her concerns rather than waiting passively for them to resolve. She made a choice, even though it was prompted by fear. And in making that choice, she discovered that a career shift, even one born from anxiety about the future, could lead to genuine satisfaction and a different kind of fulfillment. The work itself—creative, immediate, tangible—offered something her previous role had not, regardless of how she arrived there.